Charisma and the Fictions of Black LeadershipExodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and CultureMartin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

Stephen Knadler is professor of English at Spelman College where he teaches courses in US literature and cultural studies. He is the author of The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002) and Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African American Literature (Routledge, 2009–10). His current project Sanitary Citizenship: Vitality Politics and the Black Lives of Racial Uplift theorizes and examines how African American cultural production in the early twentieth-century United States disrupted and troubled the biopolitical management around health and disability central to the emergence of modern racial capitalism and liberal citizenship.

The election of Barack Obama as the first African American president has crowded a critical field within black studies seeking to decrypt the contradictions of our “Obama era”: How do we reconcile claims of colorblind equal opportunity and a tokenized minority difference with persistent material inequalities, racism, and the strategic exclusions of a criminalized poor? But if African Americanists have sought to account for Obama’s “failure” to further black liberation, as Erica Edwards contends, the Obama presidency represents not so much the failure of a man as the failure of a specific messianic narrative of black politics: black freedom struggles, from the Reconstruction era to the present, have been organized around the promise of an anointed race man who shepherds his people from bondage to freedom. It’s an inspiring story, one that in critical moments of African American history has sustained the...